One Paragraph Movie Review: Glengarry Glen Ross

One hundred and eighty-third film: Glengarry Glen Ross, or as I learned the cast called it at the time, ‘Death of a Fucking Salesman’. I’d heard a lot of hype about this film, particularly about the amount of swearing in it, so I was surprised to discover how simple the story is — a bunch of real estate salesmen desperate to close impossible deals with dead leads. But I slowly realised when I was watching it that the story was secondary to the griminess of the city, the punching-bag pace of the dialogue, and the legitimately awful feeling of blokey despair that sticks on you like greasy dust afterwards. It doesn’t want you to follow the story so much as live in a world that you hate, that of a testosterone-stale office full of cheap furniture and men who could badly use a hug. The cast — and hence the acting — is impolitely brilliant, and you can feel the spit smacking into the overly-large early nineties suit lapels with every shouted curse. An unmitigated sausage-fest that doesn’t change anyone’s opinion of real estate agents, I frowned the whole time, but enjoyed it. Three sets of steak knives out of five.